Description

This version is about half the width of the original (50 mm), which means its 1/8 the volume and a much faster print (yay math!). i find it takes me ~2 hours to print one (and ~8 for the original)

Rather than just being a straight scaling, this version has been tweaked so taht it will still rotate. The main differences are the number of gear teeth (much fewer, and larger), gear ratio (it now takes 2 rotations to realign, unfortunately) and pins (made much beefier, and they are all one length).

Additionally, there is a hole through the tip so that it can serve as a keychain! Print them out by the dozen and give them to friends/family/cute girls on the bus!

== Edit 6/10/2012 ==
Added a zip of the source plus .stls for every individual component.

Added a "full plate" that prints all the gears + center. Left the pins out, since you usually want to print those with different settings. Fits on a replicator (not sure about others...)

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Instructions

Print the two gear plates, the center, and the pins.

I've included the a zip of stls for each individual gear as well, along with the modified source openscad file.

I used a raft with .2 layer height, 10% infill and 50mm/s feed rate for the two plates. The center prints fine without a raft.

The pins are the key to getting the damn thing to actually rotate. Use a "multiply" profile to print the 8 pins necessary. I actually usually print 10 in a go, since usually one or two will have some flaw that makes it too loose to work correctly. The best settings I've found is to use a .3 mm layer height and 100% infill.

Then, just make sure you do a quick sand of the gears where they contact the center, and trim off any little protrusions that may be on the gear teeth (these can cause the gears to skip).

The largegearplate and fullplate have the keychain hole on the 8th (bottom) gear. You can separately print "keychaingear1" if you want the keychain connector up top

I was so curious to try my brand new Replicator 2 that I've missed the comments to the thing. This resulted in waste of plastic for 10 pins originally included in this model :D It is impossible to fit them. The print was made using PLA. Will try these little fellas tonight: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:40600http://www.thingiverse.com/thi...

This is, again, with ABS at .27mm layers on a thingomatic running at 60mm/s with sailfish. Sliced with skeinforge with stretch turned off and with 0 extra skins and 10% infill. The prints were raftless on a steel heated build platform at 100c covered with 'ABS juice'

This is in case anyone else has the same issues I did - i.e. the default pins being too long (by about .6 mm) and far too thick and with too large a lip to snap into the holes and there being far too much friction for the parts to turn easily.

So I printed these at .27 mm on a thingomatic (mk7 extruder + sailfish) with stretch turned on to make sure the holes weren't too small and I still couldn't get these to fit without drilling out the holes.. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

ABS. Printed raftless on a steel heated build platform. The crazy thing was that I tried the PLA pins as well and they wouldn't fit without enlarging the holes either. This happened with the side holes on the center as well - so it isn't an artifact of printing against the base.

yeah i remember having problems getting the include statements to work the way i wanted. I dont remember the issue exactly but in the end i just had to spell out an absolute path rather than a relative path for the includes.

Has this been successfully printed in PLA? I'm at a loss as to how the pins are to fit into the holes, as they're significantly larger thant the holes and PLA is very stiff and unyielding. Mine just won't go together, and the prints are fairly close to the stl dimensions.

Its definitely calibrated to ABS, with its shrinking issues... I personally have never printed it with pla, though it looks like one or two of the "i've made ones" have been in pla... you may just want to try some very slight scaling, like 99%. Too much and you'll probably have other issues. This may require some tweaks to the pin code to do right.

FWIW, I've had good success printing the large and small plates raftless at 0.15mm and 0.20mm but with acceleration. The gentleness of acceleration may help prevent dislodging the pieces. (Was ABS with a HBP on a ToM+Mk7 printing at 120 mm/s.)

I've printed 3 of these and the only improvement I could suggest is to make the pins a tiny bit shorter. I think that might help with the looseness of the gears. I'm talking about shortening the shaft of the pin by a tiny amount so the gears would be tighter to the center.

Good call. I definitely screwed up the math on the pins lengths (and just ended up subtracting some random magical value to compensate). Made them about a millimeter shorted and it seems much tighter now.

Haha, good question. It's similar to the large heart instructions. Basically, the small gears go on the small faces of the center, and the big gears to the big faces.

Beyond that, it comes down to "assemble it so it looks like heart". This should mostly be straight forward (as long as you fall the rule above), however there are two pairs of gears that look the same, but are actually mirrored (so they go on specific sides).

Best advice is to use the picture as
a template, and if you get it fully assembled but it doesn't quite look right, try swapping the mirrored gear pairs.

the .rar has all the individual gear stls (some of which might be an older version, in which the new pins wont fit), and the actual openscad source for everything, so you can modify and export however you see fit.

Open SCAD doesn't work for me. This is news but I've tried every computer I have available but when I press F6 the thing dies. All I need is it heartgears.scad run with isAttachment=false and I can do the rest.

AWESOME job!!! I got all caught up in college classes, so wasn't able to keep working on this, but you've done an amazing job! I can't wait to print a bunch of these once i'm back up to full printing speed!!

Could you change the design of the topmost piece (heartger1 in the original screwless gears) so that it has a loop to hang the heart from? This design http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16893http://www.thingiverse.com/thi... has the hook, but it isn't a functioning design. It looks and functions awesome as is, but it just looks cooler when the heart is upright. Kudos on the design as well :)

Thanks! Ill see if i can get some time to do it this weekend (though i prefer the hole at the bottom, makes rotating it a little easier and more intuitive than at the top, since top and bottom rotate in the same direction)

First round came out pretty good. Nice work! I tweaked the layout a little of each of the STLs so that it can be dual-struded to produce two at once. For the pins, I did two sets of pins, then dual-struded them for a complete set in one print. Let me know if you want the modified STLs - I can post a derivative.

OH man, this is great !!! Good work! I've built the heart gear at least a hundred times now, from 6.5cm to 20cm across, but I've never got it to work this small. awesome stuff, I can't wait to print :)